Linux support for external symbol table

Linux support for external symbol table

Feature request: Linux ELF files have a GNU extension that allows storing the debugging symbol table for an executable in an external file. There are two ways to reference this external file in an ELF file, but it appears as though the Intel debugger doesn't support automatically (or manually, for that matter) opening up an external symbol table when reading in an ELF executable. I've found this site useful for describing how both methods work:

Ideally, we would like to be able to use these methods in the debugger, since we like to keep our optimized executables high-speed and lightweight by stripping out the debugging symbols, but still allowing us to attach a debugger when things go awry. We have already confirmed that ifort supports passing in "-Wl,--build-id" to the linker, and things seem to work properly when we just use the "objcopy --only-keep-debug" and "objcopy -add-gny-debuglink" methods and debug using the "gdb" debugger (though the gdb debugger tends to crash quite a bit due to the alien variable types ifort creates).

thanks for submitting the feature request. I escalated it to our development team. As the Intel(R) Debugger is currently in a deprecated state I wetnt ahead and created the feature request for the open source successor product we arecurrently working on. I also stated the importance of Fortran support in this context to the devlopment team.

it is still fully supported in the Composer XE 2013 product line and will continue to be supported in all the current minor releases throughout 2013. We are however putting most of our development effort into Eclipse CDT integration instead of our own Eclipse RCP based UI. In addition we are focusing on improving GDB and adding new capablities (and improved Fortran support) there.